The doctrine of the untermensch in the wild

“Maybe Hitler didn’t have the wrong idea. He just went after the wrong people. The people he should have gone after if he wanted to attain a higher level of human should be the people who run this site and those who believe there is nothing wrong with the bullshit this site pumps out.”

Imagine the outcry if he found (presumably) her real identity and said in response that if he ever finds himself in her company he is going to immediately use overwhelming force in self-defense because of her public declaration of intent to inflict grievous maiming upon his person if she ever is in his vicinity. Of course we all know how that would end, as we know reliably from various white knights in places like W4 that “only brutes” would ever lay a hand on a woman. Even if she’s aiming for your manhood with a rusty blade covered with tetanus microbes.

Zippy,
You have said “Human authority which discriminates, binds us to its discriminations, and enforces its discriminations legitimately is essential to, is virtually a definition of, politics and government.”

My question is Whence the binding? What obliges me to be bound by a particular authority?. How do I know which authority is binding over me?

Gian:
That is an entirely distinct question – a “genetic” question, and one I don’t have to address in order to make the point I make here.

The point I make here depends on the nature of government, not its origins. All governments by their nature initiate force and discriminate authoritatively in support of some particular conception of the good. No exceptions.

That statement is like the statement “swans are feathered birds.” Asking the question “yes but how did they become swans” is a change of subject.

Furthermore, I expect that for most people identifying the governments to which they are beholden is straightforward, much as identifying (say) one’s own father is, again for most people, straightforward. The question seems to be asked more as a kind of plaintive “do I really have to obey him?”

Zippy,
I understand that it is a separate question but one I had been hoping you would address sometime.
Do you not think there is more to be said and understood in this question than identification of one’s father.
Fatherhood is am empirical matter. But is statehood?

Fair enough. I’ll add to that aspect of the discussion at some point if I think I have something interesting to say. But in general I do think that government is as much an organic, emergent thing as (say) property, and though neither property nor governance admit of quite the same empirical certainty as paternity they are still part of the same general, uh, family of things.

What I love about the brouhaha from the RoK article (also the other one on dating girls with eating disorders) is that these women reveal themselves for what they are, and we can take a good, critical look at their written statements and perhaps use their words to win away some of their followers.

When I posted Why do feminists tend to be emotionally volatile, obsessive, violent, and hysterical? one young, naive feminist named Sam was just sure that the people who had written such horrible, violent things about me couldn’t possibly be real feminists. Because real feminists would never say such horrible things! But watching the video I linked to really gave her pause and made her think a bit. By the end, she was clearly trying to distance herself from “those” kinds of feminists.

Also the libertarian rejects obligatory binding and may emphasize ‘exit’ over ‘voice’– There is no We is one libertarian slogan.
Clearly, some variants, even influential, would have problems with your formulation of what government is.

Also, it may be worth pointing out that the beginning of Marxism is taking the libertarian attitude about authority and applying it to government enforced “private” authority, a.k.a. property.

And the sign says “Anybody caught trespassing will be shot on sight”
So I jumped the fence and I yelled at the house
Hey! What gives you the right!
To put up a fence and keep me out, or to keep Mother Nature in
If God was here, he’d tell it to your face, man, you’re some kind of sinner

A Marxist is a libertarian who has been mugged by reality … but hasn’t given up his liberalism.

The unspoken subtext of the uproar over the ROK post is that there is somehow a proper way to fornicate with women with eating disorders. The objection isn’t that such fornication is occurring, since there would be equal outrage if one were to:

1) Insist that such women marry or abstain from sex.
2) Urge men to avoid fornicating with anorexics, etc in favor of more desirable women.

There are it would seem an established set of rules of the road for fornication, which the men at ROK are clearly violating. Fornicate with her so long as she gives her consent, but do so with the godly love of a husband (but don’t “trap” her with commitment to be your wife). Welcome to the new sexual morality.